ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the immediate challenge of peace consolidation and stabilisation that confronts an outside force deployed in a peacebuilding capacity. The challenge of establishing a peacebuilding environment that is sufficiently secure and predictable for longer-term objectives to be pursued without fear of sudden and catastrophic reversal inevitably raises the issue of the use and utility of military force. With the signing of a 'Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement' in Pretoria in December 2002, the Second Congo War technically came to an end. The Haitian mission's innovative use of intelligence represented a noteworthy 'departure from the traditional approach to "peacekeeping"'. For populations emerging from protracted armed conflict, the first signs of a 'peace dividend', of a visible transformation wrought by the end of war, are improvements in basic, often life-sustaining, services: water, food, sanitation, electricity and public health.
